You Lost Me There (11 page)

I dropped Russell off at Jordan Pond on the way to work. His plan was to climb the Bubble mountains, then jog the five miles back to the house, on top of the five-mile run he had done earlier that morning. He was training, he said, this was nothing.

In New York, Sara had invented a game called “Who’s Russell Sleeping with Now?” The game would proceed by our guessing the new woman’s occupation, generation, and figure, and only once we got all three right would Russell tell us her name.

She set him up, twice, with friends of hers, but he cheated on both of them.

Russell hopped out of the car and ran off, his shorts barely covering his hamstrings, his back pocket stuffed with energy gel packets.

“Don’t go too hard,” he shouted, waving good-bye. “It’s Saturday, remember.”

 

 

 

In Boston, I was in the right place at the right time: I was one of several researchers connecting Alzheimer’s disease with its molecular correlates, and our success became the foundation for my career. Afterward, though, I didn’t know where to turn. For the first time in my working experience, after years of application, I was burned out. I had little interest in doing anything. I’d sit up at night, turning pages in a book without grasping a sentence. I was certain I wanted to continue research on AD, I knew I wanted to make a greater, more individual mark, but how, exactly?

During the evenings I took to walking around Cambridge, I went back to Mrs. Gill, to her butterflies and her lectures on Darwin, out near the utility sheds on a trail behind the school baseball field.
He’s not telling us what it’s like to be an ant. He shows us what it’s like to be a human.
One of those evenings, a damp Boston dusk, I picked up a student edition of
The Origin of Species
and reread it in a sequence of coffee shops. Boiled down, what struck me was Darwin’s key early insight: that species changed. Rare for his time, he understood that species weren’t deposited on the earth finished by a higher hand, unchanging. Species evolved, though at first Darwin couldn’t say how exactly.

A mentor of mine, Dr. Ernst Schranz, phoned one evening from Manhattan, just as I was hanging up my coat. He sounded as if his mouth were full of washcloths, but he was customarily curt:
Victor, why have you not called, you should be here in New York, Boston is for beans
. I could picture him in a bow tie, sitting with one of his dachshunds on his lap. He’d recently landed at NYU after an era in Chicago, apparently someone had found a mattress stuffed with money to establish a center on aging and had picked Schranz to lead.
If you are looking for direction, may I suggest to you south.
When Sara got home, once I mentioned Ernst’s invitation, she started jumping up and down, but I needed more time. It was like when we were courting, I hadn’t known I wanted to marry Sara until I worked it out on paper. One afternoon, going through Central Park on a long walk uptown from her apartment, I was so brimming over I had to sit down and decipher my feelings, and on the back of an old concert ticket I wrote a list to parse my thoughts, headed “About Sara.” Item one: “
She is endlessly interesting.
” Item two: “
I am happiest when I’m around her.
” Item three, which was a surprise to me as soon as the pen stopped: “
Get married.
” Two weeks later, I proposed.

So over a long week, I walked the river and snuck around Cambridge and made notes, like a homeless poet. There was a pragmatic side, I figured out, lacking in my work to that point. Human genetic research was an austere, cloistered discipline. From further phone conversations, I had the voices of Ernst and his wife, Trude, in my ear, imploring me in their Austrian accents to follow my instincts, yes, my gut, yes, but also to ground that hard thinking not only in the service of my career and science, but suffering, the human experience.
You will remember there are unique rewards from therapeutic angles
. And Ernst was right: most times, scientific labor was monotonous seed-counting, a series of such tasks as putting auto parts together, accomplished amid the din of refrigerator banks. But to believe that during the waiting, throughout the long night, the work might someday connect from lab to life, that it was more than factory procedures, meant a lot.

The molecular mechanisms we’d uncovered at Harvard provided specific targets to take aim at. Accepting that amyloid beta (Abeta) was the main component in the plaques in our sufferers’ brains, there had seemed to me three solutions during those walks. I wrote them down one afternoon on a bar napkin: one, to immunize the brain against Abeta, so that the body could mount a defense; two, to stifle the production of Abeta in the first place; or three, to work at protecting neurons and their synaptic connections from Abeta, to repair or regenerate neurons under attack. It was the third tactic that appealed the most to me, realizing my childhood science-fiction fascinations: the idea that there was a way to lodge into a brain some neuroprotective assistance. Not to interfere, but to boost. To collaborate and shield. Soon after, I returned Ernst’s phone call, and Sara and I went out to celebrate over cheeseburgers at a grim diner in Davis Square, our haunt, toasting with a red wine that tasted like sherry.

Both Ernst and his wife died the year Sara and I left for Bar Harbor, within weeks of each other. At the time, dragged down by liver disease, Ernst had been pushing me to leave NYU.
You’re gifted, Victor, but you are no good at getting out of a rut.
Still to that day, a Saturday morning spent thinking about him and our work together was far more pleasurable than running ten miles around a park.

But I didn’t have a succinct way to explain all that to Russell.

While my houseguest got his exercise, I reviewed the updates on a few of our running experiments. But my mind wandered. I’d stop work, and there was Regina amid the CD towers, inside the telephone cradle. While I stared at charts with my glasses perched on my forehead, my mind crafted lists of how remarkable she was, and how I’d let her down.

How she deserved a man who would take her out, not one she ordered in.

When my computer crashed, I got up and paced the hall that lapped our rooms. I listened to air conditioners and sizzling fluorescent bulbs, and the chattering of fingers on old keyboards. I stared out a window and thought about driving home and opening Sara’s office again, unlocking the file cabinet, reading those other cards.

I still couldn’t remember what movie we’d seen the night we met.

I decided on a drive downtown. I needed new swim goggles anyway.

The clerk at the sports store was a teenage giant with acne on both cheeks. I took my time testing out different pairs of goggles. I turned away, trying out the darkest lenses, and stared out the front window, and then there was Regina, blue-green Regina through the goggles, walking down the street.

She was wearing a tank top and black jeans. Her curly hair was held back with two butterfly clips. It was her cheeks that got me—bright, round, and high. Lindsay, the green-haired roommate, hung back a step, saying something loudly with a slanted mouth. They disappeared.

What would Hercule Poirot do? What would Darwin? I darted out and slipped into the crowd. Regina and the roommate had crossed the street and were going into a coffee shop. I watched them from a restaurant window’s reflection.

You once had front-row seats
, said one voice in a Viennese accent.

Now you are spying?
said another.

A minute later the girls left the shop carrying iced coffees, and hugged and parted ways: Regina down an alley, the roommate heading straight for my spot.

I walked into the first open door, a native crafts shop. A woman was buying a poster of a wolf kissing a dolphin in outer space. The roommate walked past outside without seeing me, and after a minute, I jogged down toward the harbor, looking along the side streets. I stopped after three blocks and caught my breath.

Regina was gone.

And what I would have done if I’d actually caught up with her, I had no idea! I started laughing. I sat down on a stone wall, outside a video-rental store, and had to cover my mouth with my hand. People were staring. I stood up and faced the shop to avoid attention. A sun-faded cardboard figure was propped up in the window: Bruce Willis from
The Fifth Element
, with bleached-blond hair, wearing an orange rubber wife-beater, staring down at me.

I wiped my eyes and caught my breath, and focused on tamping down.

Be steadfast for once
, said Bruce.
Act your age.

Down the road was a drugstore with a working soda fountain. It was where Aunt Betsy would go as a girl, she’d said, to buy watermelon slices or blueberry pie. I sat at the counter, ordered a tuna melt and coffee, and ate lunch over the
Bar Harbor Times.

On the cover, under the headline “Exclusive Investigation,” was a picture of large dredging equipment being installed in Bass Harbor, and an inset picture of Betsy’s famous fashion designer. She’d beaten the press once again. In her honor, I turned to the police report.

Report: An elderly man in Town Hill called 911 to report the vice president whispering obscenities through his mail slot. Report: A married couple in West Tremont was arrested for selling crystal methamphetamine. Report: In Northeast Harbor, there’d been two driving-while-intoxicated arrests after a fund-raiser for the local repertory theater. Report: A woman in Bernard had been fined for housing exotic animals, specifically a tiger cub, without proper permits.

I stared at the sandwich in my hand. I couldn’t place the last time I’d ordered a tuna melt. I’d given them up one day after Lucy pointed out how I’d eaten a tuna melt sandwich for lunch every day two seasons running after Sara’s accident.

The door jangled behind me and a group of retirees walked in wearing stiff new Harley-Davidson vests. I turned back to the crime reports, to the island the tourists didn’t see: a flotilla of abundance and diversity still evolving, of burlesque acts and rare jungle animals. Another part of America where there were crystals to foretell and methamphetamine to forget, and nothing stayed the same for very long. Where ordinary people were trying to get by without superpowered rubber wife-beaters while the White House snooped through their mail.

I got up and paid the bill. Regina’s green-haired roommate walked in and slipped onto my stool. She glanced at me, then picked up the newspaper, unfolded it, found the Sudoku puzzle inside, and started filling in the numbers.

 

 

 

“You really have nothing?”

“I’m sorry, sir, we’re completely booked.”

“Can I speak to Joel, please,” I said. “This is Victor Aaron calling.”

“I’m sorry, but Chef is out today.”

“Will he be in tonight?”

“I don’t know,” said the hostess, “I don’t think so.”

Russell wanted to find out who was selling Joel his wine, and said he didn’t mind mixing business with pleasure. I’d been looking forward to seeing Joel, particularly since Aunt Betsy wouldn’t be present.

Joel and Sara and I had gone out for coffee a few times when he was setting up Blue Sea. He’d been getting sober at the time and had needed company with non-addicts. Sara even went to an AA meeting with him once. After the accident, though, when I started spending my Friday evenings with Betsy, I felt out of place when Joel was around. Previously, we’d talked as equals. We were two small-business owners who’d reached a dependable level of success, and we could commiserate over management headaches or how tough it was to find good people. Labs, restaurants, orchestras, sports teams, they all relied on the transmission of command: a small team focused on seeing a director’s vision tested and checked and retuned prior to display. But with Betsy calling me at work to supply gossip reports or ask about her prescriptions, the kinship between Joel and me was trumped. I couldn’t help seeing him as she would portray us: Joel the outcast prince, and me supplying a surrogate.

Russell fixed martinis and drank two. He puffed himself up before getting out of the car. The restaurant was jammed. Hovering around the hostess podium were at least ten people hoping to sit down. Russell pinched my elbow. Two places were opening at the bar, and we slid in. The bartender was a college-age kid wearing a black clip-on bow tie. Around his neck was a hemp necklace with a starfish knotted at the bottom.

“Is Joel in tonight?”

“Nope. He’s over visiting family on Cranberry.”

“Hey, that’s your girlfriend, right?” Russell clapped me on the arm and laughed loudly. He was wearing a tight-fitting black sport jacket. A cigar case in his breast pocket was like an organ pressing up through the skin. “Listen,” Russell said to the bartender, “for now, how about we get some glasses and a corkscrew?”

He poured the wine. “To Maine.”

“To Maine.”

“To us.”

“To us.”

“To Ben Lemery,” Russell said.

“What?”

I left my glass on the bar.

“What’s the worry?”

“You’re an asshole,” I said, and got up and went to the bathroom.

Sara had referred to it on her first index card, the secret I’d divulged the night we met: that a week before he killed himself, Ben had explained to me his plan. He’d shown me the gun, his father’s .38 Special, and I didn’t tell anyone. Surely another of his stunts, I’d thought at the time. Then, on the appointed night, he called me, asking for help with his homework, and I hung up. Besides Sara, Russell was the only person who knew about Ben’s call.

“Look, I’m sorry—”

I sat back down. “How about we drop it.”

“See, I was thinking, you’re how old now?”

“Hold on,” I said, and I took his glass out of his hand and clinked it against mine. “Do me a favor. You remove the nine-eleven sticker from your windshield, then we’ll talk.”